


Regarding Valor

by batshape



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, Tolkien Gen Week Day 3: Gray Spaces, but they sure are proud, post battle of the gelion-ascar stockade, really neither of them are good at diplomatic relations, some in-depth descriptions of gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:49:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25154989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/batshape/pseuds/batshape
Summary: “You sing to bury your dead,” Caranthir said matter-of-factly in the silence which followed. “My people also do this.”“Truly, then, the houses of Men must sing an awful lot more than the elves,” replied Haleth just as matter-of-factly, though there was a strange glitter to her dark eyes. “Lord of Thargelion.”-A meeting, and then an argument. Tolkien Gen Week 2020, Day 3: Gray Spaces
Relationships: Caranthir | Morifinwë & Haleth of the Haladin
Comments: 5
Kudos: 27
Collections: Tolkien Gen Week 2020





	Regarding Valor

Men were shorter than he had expected.

It was not the first thought which occurred to him, upon dismounting his horse, for Caranthir was of well-known strange mood but he was neither entirely fae nor entirely unkind. He did note the desolation of it all, and he was indeed affected by it. 

But he bent to lift a bloodied Haladin warrior to his feet and was surprised by his height, and his solid weight. Men were heavier than he expected.

Caranthir combed the battlefield dutifully, paying greater attention to those wounded and fallen of his own host when he directed the ministrations of his healers and his captains. He knelt before the hewn bodies of Noldor more than once, bloodying his knees and boots as he imparted quiet and simple words to them all in turn. 

He knelt before the corpses of a few Men as well, in error at first, and then by design, for a few words in Quenya could surely do their departed spirits no harm. He had ordered the attention of one of his own healers to a child of Men—Caranthir imagined it was a child, though he had little evidence or experience to support this inclination beyond the general softness of their face and an expression of awful confusion at the contorted suffering which they were experiencing—who has fallen beneath a raider’s corpse. Caranthir himself had knelt and lifted the corpse’s weight from across the child, and he had witnessed the great gash made with a curved blade across their belly. Caranthir had passed his hand above the child’s shining frightened eyes and then called for a healer, and he had not spoken the parting words in Quenya to which he had recited over empty  _ hröar _ , for hope of prolonging life within the flesh yet.

He picked his way through the gore in this manner, occasionally drawing the sharp knife of his brother’s craft which he carried always at his waist: twice to slash the throats of orc raiders who had yet survived the butchering of their own bodies and lay now bleeding in the soil, and once to break with the pommel the stiffened hand of a raider who had caught one of Caranthir’s own warriors by her braids and driven a sword into her back. He imparted his quiet farewell to her  _ fëa _ and proceeded forward.

Men bled more than he had expected.

His hands were slick with it by the time he reached her; Caranthir had drawn much blood and himself been marked by a few orcish blades in the attack, but his hands were slippery mostly with the Noldorin and Mannish blood that had spilled from mouths, bubbled from throats, coated fingers of both his own host and the Haladin when the few of them who passed in his company had clasped his hands fiercely and then died. Caranthir said, “Lady Haleth,” and turned his palms open before him, so that she could see he was of no ill intent.

She was shorter, wider, and bloodier than he had imagined. Her dark hair was matted with drying red and brown, the furs of her collar and cuffs sticky with gore. She appraised his slippery scarlet hands and did not incline her head.

“My Lord.” She returned her gaze to the bodies before her. “I thank you for your coming.”

“I regret that it was not sooner,” Caranthir replied, albeit haltingly. Caranthir was not of noble tongue as so much of his family was, and diplomatic exchange on the heels of battle was not his great talent. Now that the delight of violence had ceased to sing in his veins, and he was not nearly as half-wild and enraged as he had been while he was slashing limbs from bodies and heads from shoulders, he was quiet and wanted for rest. “I am sorry for it.”

The Lady Haleth nodded. She came just below Caranthir’s throat in height, her shoulders broader than his. He noted her physical presence well: there was a strong smell of blood about her, and a gravity which compelled him to look long upon her face. He knew the sound and shape of a leader when he saw one, having seen it in his father and his brother and not himself—and Haleth’s nature was fortunate, for a leader she was now. Caranthir had heard of the death of Haldad, and been told of the slaying of her brother. He too nodded.

“I offer our assistance in the care of your wounded,” he said. “Though our healers will need instruction in the ways of tending to Men to do so.”

“That can be provided,” the Lady Haleth said to him measuredly, though she did not look upon  _ his _ face. “I thank you.”

“And with your permission, we can assist with the burial of your people. We do not know your rites, but if you wish for more hands—”

“This will not be necessary.” She looked into his face now, and Caranthir noted that Men were less skilled at guarding their intimate thoughts than he had imagined. The Lady Haleth was grieving, and she wanted most privately for Caranthir to leave her to it. Something else flickered in her expression; he thought, strangely, that it might have been affront. “I thank you for your offer, my Lord, but the deaths of our warriors are something which we mourn amongst ourselves.”

“I see.” Caranthir nodded stiffly. “Then I ask only that any recovered bodies of the Eldar are delivered to my people, so that we may do the same.”

“I will see to it.”

“A hunting party is departing at dusk,” Caranthir continued. “If you wish it, we can provide food to your hungry.”

“And to your own?” She looked upon him skeptically, perhaps appraisingly, and Caranthir felt the warmth of color in his cheeks. But he was a touch too weary to bristle in true anger, even at the implication that the host of Thargelion could not provide for a night for a weakened and embattled tribe of Men.

“We have not withstood a siege, my lady.” Again, he spread his palms. “But I offer it only at your will.”

She observed his bloodied hands again, with muted interest now. “Chief Haleth,” she said only. “I do not bear that title. I am not a lady of anything.”

Caranthir nodded. He turned on his heel and noted only upon his retreat that he had neglected to exchange with Chief Haleth his own name and title.

*

Men also sang at the burial of their dead. Caranthir observed such from the edge of the Noldorin camp, and thought that his brother would be curious to see it. 

Men were not fair singers—at the least, the Haladin were not—and yet the climb of their voices was not unlovely to hear. Caranthir himself was an unskilled singer by the standards of his people, and he had rarely sung either in pleasure or in grief since the scattering of his brothers across Beleriand.

He had sung tonight, joining his brittle voice with the fairer tones which sang for the  _ fëar _ of their fallen, and had thought of his brothers then too.

He smelled the blood and the salt of the Haladin emissaries even before he heard their approach, and from behind him two archers notched their strings. Caranthir gestured severely for the remedying of this, and the first of the two Men spoke.

She was younger in face than her new chieftain, though she looked similarly world-weary. Caranthir wondered at what age Men began to look so tired, and if the timing of it was a universal shift among their people. He thought that he himself had not yet begun to look as weary as this.

“Our chieftain requests a meeting with your Lord Caranthir of Thargelion,” relayed the first emissary to his camp, and Caranthir dipped his head.

“At what hour does Chief Haleth request my presence?” Both emissaries withdrew slightly at the even cadence of his reply, at his bright eyes. Men, Caranthir noted, did not boast voices nor gleam comparable.

“At your convenience, my Lord,” replied the second emissary, a Man with a lined face and an ungroomed beard. “Tonight, if it would interest you.”

“Tonight?” Caranthir was battle-weary, but he had suffered little in the way of injury and could withstand even talk of diplomacy for a few hours more. “Then I may accompany you back to your camp now, if it would please your Chief.”

The emissaries bowed ungracefully and retreated to the edge of the Noldorin camp to converse among themselves in the quiet, rough tongue of their people. Caranthir turned to his own captains, whose faces advised him against engaging in diplomatic endeavors himself, arguably wisely. Caranthir had no head for it, and his temperament was ill-suited to fostering noble impressions.

The two archers who had notched arrows on the Men’s emissaries stood expectantly, and Caranthir nodded his assent. He observed his own raiment by firelight and wondered if he should change. He was not still bloodstained, but he did not know the customary diplomatic dress of Men, and he had doubts that the Chief of the Haladin would look kindly upon his meeting her with unbound hair and half-tied hunting leathers. He should meet with her in the colors and star of his house, as he met with the Eldar and the Naugrim. He should  _ make an effort _ , was what Neylo would say.

Caranthir wondered when he began to coach his own actions with the imagined words of his brothers. The thought made him scowl. The thought made him want to meet with Chief Haleth of the Haladin in his unbound hair and his hunting leathers.

A captain of his own lifted a bolt of deep red from the space where Caranthir had left it, and he recognized his fur-lined cloak. He accepted it wordlessly and clasped it against the hollow of his throat with a nod.

He would not agonize over his state of dress for a meeting in a Mannish tent on a sodden battleground. He was a lord of Thargelion, and if social custom of all kinds still eluded him in this century of his life, not one of the Haladin needed to know it.

Caranthir turned, and the two archers turned with him.

*

Chief Haleth received him not alone, but with a female of her own command who knelt beside her place. Caranthir had not brought his archers inside with him—indeed, he had thought it a show of goodwill to leave them outside to stand at the entrance. Now he wondered if he had erred in doing so.

He bowed shallowly at the waist. “Chief Haleth.”

Haleth was standing, still partially dressed for battle upwards of her waist, and upon his entrance she sat cross-legged on a cushion Haleth’s furs had been removed; Caranthir espied them soaking in a tub of reddish-black water and smelled the diluted blood and wet animal hide. He wrinkled his nose.

The chief of the Haladin was watching him as he lifted his head. She did not speak. Caranthir watched her in return.

Men smelled of earth, woodsmoke, salt. A sweet sharpness followed them where they moved, not quite the scent of unwash and not quite unpleasant (though perhaps at present, Caranthir was simply wont to appreciate anything which was not the metal-scent of blood within the tent).

Haleth was brown-skinned, the sun-exposed regions of her arms and her face perhaps only a shade deeper than Caranthir’s own complexion, and her hair—tied at the base of her neck in battle, but now unbound—was dark and fell thick and tangled onto her shoulders. A spray of blood arced across the bridge of her nose, and blood also marked her throat and her mouth and her armored chest. Her eyes were weary, and red, and Caranthir recognized the physiological hallmark of long-weeping, for it was the same among his people.

“Chief Haleth,” Caranthir said, as the second woman in the tent averted her eyes and busied herself with the apparently urgent scrubbing of the bloodied furs. “I am Caranthir of Thargelion. You sent for me.”

“We have met,” Haleth said. “I knew who you were then.”

“I apologize for failing to introduce myself, regardless,” Caranthir began, but Haleth waved a dismissive hand and said, “You may sit, lord of Thargelion.”

Caranthir had spent a long youth being interrupted and dismissed by brother and greater authority alike, but he had not experienced such often in Thargelion, and the surprise of it made him sit on command. He frowned as he did so, and yet he folded his legs beneath him and sat stiffly on a cushion across from the Haladin chief.

“You sing to bury your dead,” Caranthir said matter-of-factly in the silence which followed. “My people also do this.”

“Truly, then, the houses of Men must sing an awful lot more than the elves,” replied Haleth just as matter-of-factly, though there was a strange glitter to her dark eyes. “Lord of Thargelion.”

“Lord Caranthir,” Caranthir corrected, and the chieftain’s mouth quirked sideways in a way which made him wonder what amusement he had accidentally voiced.

“Lord Caranthir.”

“I do not know if it is a truth to say Men sing more than elves, for I have only known Men personally since this morning,” replied Caranthir simply, “but you certainly do not sing as well.”

“I thank you for your judgement,” Haleth said, though she did not sound as if she felt an overwhelming amount of gratitude. “Surely, in all your time languishing in your grand halls, you have had the time to become experts in such things.”

Caranthir felt his face warm. “I mean no offense—“

“I have no interest in discussing the funerary songs of my people or yours, Lord Caranthir,” said Haleth. “I meant to thank you for your hunters’ assistance in feeding my people, and your healers’ aid in attending to our wounded.”

Caranthir dipped his head. “Of course. The Haladin have fought nobly.”

“Is that what made us worthy of saving?” inquired Haleth. She gestured to her handmaiden to assist her in the shedding of her armor while Caranthir floundered.

“My lady—“

“Haleth.”

“Lady Haleth,” Caranthir corrected, and she snorted. “Again, I mean no offense. I intended only to commend your warriors—“

Haleth waved a hand. Her handmaiden unbuckled her right arm bracer as she did so, and it clattered heavily to the ground. “I also meant no immediate offense. It was a simple enough question.”

Caranthir nodded, and in light of this, he considered the truth. He had indeed been impressed by the battling skill of the Haladin, and their bitter persistence to stay alive. He had been marked, too, by the ways in which they died. They had stained his hands. His hair, following a furious wash, still reeked of the blood of Men.

Caranthir tilted his head. “If not of saving,” he confessed plainly, “your valor was what made you worthy of continued aid.”

“I see.” Haleth observed him coolly now. Another bracer was freed of her left forearm. “You are a strange people.”

“My lady?”

Haleth’s handmaiden bent her head to loosen the gorget from around her chieftain’s collar, and Haleth paused for her to succeed before she continued.

“I have heard the old stories of the Lord on Lake Helevorn and his kin,” Haleth said. “And I have always wondered how the Noldor in Beleriand parse noble from ignoble acts.”

“My lady.” Caranthir felt the rush of blood in his throat, heard the flattening of his own tone. Haleth must have heard as well, but she paid no attention to it. Her gaze was steady.

“Perhaps if I lived centuries, and my kin lived centuries, I would come to understand. But I confess, I do not.” She shrugged, but the movement was not casual. “To the Haladin, the people of my father, it is noble to survive, and to help others survive. Perhaps, if we lived as long and as well as the Eldar, we would think more of qualifiers. But we do not.”

“My people do not consider survival ignoble,” Caranthir said lowly, knowing as he did that his face darkened. Haleth considered him simply.

“Of course not,” she agreed. “But how often do you consider the survival of Men at all, Lord Caranthir of Thargelion?”

Caranthir scowled. Haleth’s handmaiden unlaced and removed her jacket, and Haleth herself initiated the process of shrugging out of her shirt. She held his gaze as she did so, and if she wished Caranthir to speak, she would have been disappointed.

Men were more infuriating than he had expected.

“I thank you for your generosity, both in aiding and in feeding my people, Lord Caranthir. But I ask you not to tell your stories, when we have withered or have died on the sword, of the great savior you were to our  _ humble _ people, when you rode in on your horses after my family was cut down.”

“I do not tell that manner of stories.”

Haleth tilted her head. “Perhaps not. For those are not the kind of stories I have heard of you.”

Anger rose in him, and he stood with it. “Lady Haleth—“

“Chief Haleth, Lord Caranthir. Call me as I will it.”

“ _ Chief  _ Haleth, then, I do not take kindly to insult—“

“Do you not?” Haleth had removed her shirt and passed it absently to her handmaiden. Her belly and her chest above her breastband were crossed with paler scars. “I apologize. I do not take kindly to the death of my kin, or to the belated sparing of my people motivated by an elf lord’s perception of our nobility _. _ ”

Caranthir yet stood. His jaw was tight. “I apologize, Chief Haleth, for bringing you offense by  _ saving _ your people—“

Haleth did not stand, but her voice rang colder and clearer than he had yet heard from the race of Men when she spoke over him now. “Half of my people, perhaps,  _ Lord _ Caranthir. A third of my people,  _ perhaps _ . Many died in the time before you arrived with your cavalry, not the least of those the parents of my nephew. How long have the Haladin lived in these lands, that we only just caught your notice? Were we not worthy of trade, or of dialogue, before this great opportunity to assert the power of the Eldar arose?”

She looked upon him unflinchingly, and her handmaiden too did not scurry from the tent under the heat of his gaze. The silent woman bore Haleth’s sword, kneeling amongst her discarded armor and cleaning the blade methodically with an oiling cloth. Caranthir seethed. 

“I thank you, truly, for deigning to acknowledge our insignificant existence now, when raiders threatened your own settlements,” continued Haleth measuredly. “But was my father not _noble_ enough with an ax, that he did not meet with you before he was slain? We have had trade with the dwarves of the Blue Mountains too, and they have found us worthy of conversation not just for our valor in a battle. But only now that we have held the rivers against Morgoth’s raiders for you, losing two leaders and much of our people as we have, you find it at last suitable to offer us aid? If you wish to call yourself our _salvation,_ Lord Caranthir, you must do more than ride in to claim a victory and offer aid in burying our dead. We have much experience with untimely funerals. We do not require elven aid to perform them now.”

Caranthir snarled where he stood, but Haleth did not fold. The fire of her dark eyes, the spray of blood across her cheeks, made her, even short, unarmored, and seated as she was, almost equally as fearsome a figure as Caranthir knew he was now.

“Did you summon me here to berate me, then, Chief Haleth?” he demanded. “For I too understand the death of kin, and the loss of a people, and I will not accept the insinuation that I have an unfounded or uninformed sympathy for it.”

“But I do not want your sympathy, Lord Caranthir,” she answered, and beside her the handmaiden set to work on scrubbing the stain of gore from her armor. “I want your acknowledgement, and I will thank you for the breadth of your deeds but no further. I buried my father and my brother and his wife at last today, and I am yet dressed in their blood, and their deaths may have been avoided were we not consistently overlooked by the Eldar until we showed  _ nobility _ in death.”

Caranthir felt his snarl falter and his curled lip fold back over his bared teeth, and he dipped his head.  _ Make an effort.  _

“I am sorry for the death of your father,” he said lowly, though his blood rushed in his ears and he felt the stain of a blush still across his cheeks and his temples. “And of your brother, and of your brother’s wife. I am sorry that your people have suffered in our lands, and that the Noldor have not brought you ease in living here.”

“I do not ask for ease, Lord Caranthir,” spoke Haleth sternly. “Do all of your people listen so poorly to plain speech? I do not implore you for an apology, and I do not wish for my people to be a story in the annals of the Eldar, so that you may remind yourselves when we have passed that you have done us this one kindness, when next you commit a crime against your own people.”

“I object to that,” Caranthir snapped, but Haleth only tilted her head.

“Is it untrue? Is that not what your cousins have made of the Edain’s First House? Whether there is more truth to that story or not—by my death I will not know it, I’m sure—I wish not to be made Friend of the Noldor, so that I can be called a servant to elves and not a leader of my own people.”

“That is not where my objection lies,” Caranthir said hotly, and Haleth raised a brow.

“Is the rest of it false? Please, inform me if I have remembered my histories wrong.”

Again Caranthir floundered, for she was not wrong, and yet anger sat heavy in his mouth for her nonchalant invocation of the kinslaying, and he only scowled. Haleth, seeing this, dipped her head.

“I do thank you for your estimation of my people as noble, Lord Caranthir, for I think you mean well by it. But I ask you not to call us by it again, and bid you to know that we care little for your judgement of our valor, whether it exists or not. If you would only think of us in terms of our bravery, I would rather you did not think of us at all.”

And then silence fell, for Caranthir knew not how to reply—he had by now familiarized himself with the customs and manner of the Naugrim, and knew somewhat their peculiarities of speech and conceptualizations of insult, but he had not previously encountered Men and never considered how to respond to such condemnation as this. Haleth’s handmaiden now occupied herself with the sharpening of Haleth’s sword, its imperfect craftsmanship dulled on the thick sinew and bone of orcish raiders. The only sound between them was the steady drawing of whetstone against metal.

“This has been illuminating,” Caranthir said at last, for it seemed like a diplomatic thing to say. Evidently it was not, for the chieftain of the Haladin snorted. “Thank you for extending the invitation to meet.”

“I will do it again tomorrow evening, Lord Caranthir, if you wish to continue our conversation.” Haleth considered him levelly. “We will repay your host’s favor of feeding us, and I invite you to sup with me and my guard, if it pleases you.”

Caranthir nodded, and then he placed a hand over his heart and bowed shallowly at the waist. Someone of the Haladin was singing a funerary song as he departed from Haleth’s tent, and Caranthir thought of his brothers, and of the kin of Haleth, and for a moment he considered raising his own voice in mourning for something inexplicable in his chest.

But he did not, and he withdrew from the Haladin’s camp to the sound of Mannish singing alone.

**Author's Note:**

> I personally imagine the preoccupation with things like valor, glory, and a person's singular greatness as something that would be more instilled in the Eldar than the Edain. Caranthir and Haleth seem like they would butt heads over this sort of thing. 
> 
> Settling down to the best of one's ability might not be something that gets histories written about you, but maybe that's preferable to dying horribly in battle anyway.  
> (I do imagine that they became strong friends, but I think it was rocky in the beginning. Also, there's a power imbalance here to contend with, and I think Haleth takes great note of that sort of thing. Hence, gray spaces.)


End file.
